


And The Dead Are All Living

by mllelaurel



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Deadpan Byleth, F/M, Female My Unit | Byleth, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Tiny Smatterings of Nascent Femdom D/s, Wosh U Hobo, implied/referenced canon character death, implied/referenced suicidal ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:47:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24843265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mllelaurel/pseuds/mllelaurel
Summary: In the wake of Gronder Field, Dimitri needs a bath.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/My Unit | Byleth
Comments: 12
Kudos: 87
Collections: FE3H Kink Meme





	And The Dead Are All Living

The rain has drenched them all the way through and the moon has reached its zenith by the time Dimitri lets go of Byleth’s hand. She shakes out her wet hair, dog-like, and says, “Do you need the cold?”

“Need it?” Dimitri rumbles. It’s been five years since he’s thought of her as someone who made sense. But maybe that’s because he stopped listening. She’s Byleth, blunt and baroque all at once. Sensible and alien in ways someone half-dead and rusty like him can identify with. 

“The rain can shock you,” Byleth says. “Your skin goes numb. It drowns out sound, like a curtain between you and the world.” Too late, Dimitri remembers that her father had died in the rain. How she’d clung to his body, and how others had feared approaching her ‘til she rose. 

He hadn’t been conscious enough to pray for rain back in Duscur, mad with pain and the stink of the dead. Looking at her then, he’d felt a cavernous, bitter jealousy, and turned away before it showed on his face. Empathy had swallowed up the bile and he buried it lest it hollow him out into a monster. 

“I don’t need it,” he says. 

“Let’s go inside then,” she tells him. 

He turns toward the cathedral. 

“Somewhere with a roof,” she clarifies. 

It’s instinct more than anything else that sends him there, more than worn-down faith or any sense of the familiar. The cold pews had been his home since he’d scraped himself back to Garreg Mach. To enter his old room again? Unthinkable. That room belonged to a boy. A child who’d believed himself otherwise. 

“Where else then?” he asks. 

Her face is blank as she thinks it through. He’s learned not to assume there’s nothing underneath simply because she underreacts. A tilt of the eyebrow, a pursing of the lips. She’s still learning how to be alive, even as he unlearned it. 

“The baths,” she says. “They don’t stoke the sauna at night, but the water should be hot.” 

Old irritation nips at his heels. “What does water have to do with it?” 

Byleth doesn’t rise to the bait, voice low and calm. “It’s a better way to get warm. Plus,” there it is, a tiny twitch of the lip. When has he started noting her every little movement? “You don’t smell that great. No offense.” 

He glowers. Old habits. “I bathe,” he says. Enough not to risk infection, else he’d be underground already. Even Blaiddyd constitution can only do so much. Anything more has not been a priority for some time. 

“The truth is the truth,” she says. “I don’t think less of you for it.” 

“If you wished to,” he says, “you could probably think of far better reasons.”

“I don’t,” she says, and turns on her heel. He may be king, but she is the general of his armies. She leads and he follows. 

***

The lights are dim indoors. Garreg Mach sleeps. There’s something perverse about entering such a public area at night, Dimitri thinks. A cross between a secret rite and sneaking buns from the kitchen with Sylvain when they were children. Before Sylvain’s sneak-abouts took a different turn and they ran out of things to say to one another. 

Byleth’s boots echo on the stone and wood. She takes them off before they step onto the tile and nods at him to do likewise. While he’s bent to the task, she strips off her coat and tunic, down to her breast band, and rolls up her trousers to the ankle. 

It occurs to him then that he will have to undress as well. Byleth’s company isn’t cumbersome, it isn’t that. Simply…

“Is this a bad idea?” Byleth asks. 

“You won’t like what you see,” he tells her. 

“I’ve seen worse,” she says, and starts to remove her gloves. 

The room is full of huge wooden bathtubs. She turns to the closest, fiddling with the taps until satisfied. The drum of water sounds a lot like rain as it hits the bottom, then gentler, softer as the water rises. 

She’s right. She’s seen worse. The blood still crusting the fur of his cloak is testament to that. Five years’ worth of blood, inaugurated with Dedue’s gory handprint as he told Dimitri to run. Ah, Dedue. He’d brought the cloak with him. Draped it over Dimitri’s shoulders as he shuddered naked in Cornelia’s dungeon, barely recognizing the familiar cloth or the familiar man. 

Dedue’s alive. Seeing him again hadn’t cracked Dimitri open. He’d been too far gone for that. Now, standing with Byleth in a warm dark room, it bowls him over, bends him in half like a hurricane. 

He’d heard Dedue’s voice among the ghosts. Heard Byleth’s as well, though she may truly have been dead from what he’s pieced together. That Dedue lives... Dimitri closes his eye against the hammer’s blow. 

It’s not as though he never realized the madness of his ghosts, his own voice singing them from their graves. 

He doffs the cloak. The clasp of it skitters and clangs against the tile. Byleth stoops to move it out of the way, fingering the stains with no evidence of distaste. “Leonie could restore that for you if you’d like,” she says. “Deep wash, recondition the fur… It should be doable.” 

A part of him would like to snap and call it unnecessary. “I’ll speak with her,” he says instead. His father would have misliked seeing the royal regalia in this state. It’s time to wash away Rodrigue’s blood and put him to rest. Randolph Bergliez’s as well, whose blood Rodrigue’s had paid for, the mingling of them poetic and wretched in equal measure. “She will be compensated for her efforts, of course.” 

The bath fills. Byleth dips her fingers in the water to check its temperature, then shuts off the tap. 

Dimitri starts with the easy clothes. Bracers and greaves. The leather jerkin protecting his chest. His stockings prove unsalvageable, crusty with sweat and rubbed through in his boots. He tosses them out of the way before Byleth even considers touching them. Trousers next, and smallclothes with them. His legs are not unmarred, but who’d flinch at a battle scar these days? 

Byleth turns away to allow him a share of modesty. 

He removes his shirt last, leaving only the gloves, heavy and thick, all but molded to his skin. Temptation to keep them on runs high. They’d leave him clumsy with the soap. It’s almost worth it. It’s easier to just step into the tub without making up his mind. 

The water is... He knew it would be warm. Hot even. Nothing prepared him for the deeper sense of how it would feel, scouring and lush, like taking a bow after a hard-won bout, or panting for breath on the heels of a run. 

Byleth tilts her head, watching the expressions on his face shift, then hands him a washcloth and bar of soap. It’s simple, rendered fat and soapwort, barely scented. War strips away frivolity, and Dimitri does not miss it. She picks up another bar for herself. “I’ll do your back,” she says. 

Dimitri half-turns in the confines of the tub, throat gone suddenly numb. “Don’t,” he says.

“The scars? I don’t mind,” Byleth starts to say, before something hot and murderous in his face makes her take a step back. 

“You should,” he says. 

She stands several feet away from him, mint hair still rain-plastered to her ears. “An axe didn’t do that,” she says. 

Nor a sword, a lance, nor any common kind of spell. It’s obvious to anyone with half a brain cell, Dimitri thinks. “You’re right,” he says. “An axe doesn’t flay the skin from your flesh.” It was a very specific cut, sharp and slow and brutal, and very precise in what it wanted to accomplish. 

Byleth’s eyes narrow. “Cornelia,” she says with a dead finality. 

Dimitri looks away from her, gaze fixed on his knees. “She wanted a confession from my uncle’s killer. It would strengthen her claim.” Hot shame twists in his gut. “She got what she was after.” 

“But you didn’t…”

He snorts. “Does it matter? Don’t pretend you wouldn’t have done the same, if.” He grits his teeth. _If it made the pain stop._ No amount of torture could force him to say the rest. Useless in the end. Cornelia’s goals were never just political, sadism worn too true into her bones. 

In some ways, Dimitri thinks, the two of them were not so different after all. 

“Can you reach your back?” Byleth asks, shattering the dark loop of his thoughts. “It’s easier with someone else’s help, but it should be doable without.” 

“Not as well as I’d like,” he admits with an irritated exhale. Another day, ‘well enough’ would have been his answer. He’d ask what’s changed, but there’s a howl of hysterical laughter dogging that question’s heels. Everything has changed. Everything is new and upside-down, or maybe right side-up. 

“You’ve had me at your back in a fight,” she says. “Trust me to work with you in this, too.” 

“I don’t trust easily,” he admits. “It was… easier with you. After your father’s death. After you knew, in some small part, what it was like.” 

“I don’t know what this is like,” Byleth says. Her eyes are wide and deep and full of emotion. “I’ve never been through what you faced. I wouldn’t know where to start.” 

“At least you’re honest,” he says with a dry bark of a laugh. “All right. Do your worst, Professor.” 

She stands on his left, where he can watch her. A small mercy. At least she’s smaller than Cornelia, her hair a different shade, her sword-wielding hands rougher than those of a court mage. 

The soap turns to slippery lather. Byleth’s touch gets firmer where the nerves are gone. This way he can at least feel the pressure. “Do the rest of you,” she tells him. 

Dimitri stares at the soap and cloth in his hands, already forgotten. “Right,” he says. 

“You’re my friend,” Byleth says. It seems to come out of nowhere, until she adds, “I’m still not washing your balls, though.”

Dimitri sputters. Then lifts his soap and gets to work. 

***

The water’s turned opaque with shed grime by the time he’s done. Byleth fills another tub while waiting for him to finish up. “So you’re not soaking in that,” she says. The tiny, thoughtful gesture floors him. Gratitude is one thing. But this. She’s already done so much for him. Half of him wonders when her patience will run out. The other half counts down the minutes until she guesses wrong, proves herself not so numinously, frightfully in tune with him. 

He hates it sometimes, the way she can read him like a book. Bad enough being literally naked before her. Her kindness strips him below the skin, grating under keloid, fat and sinew. 

Nevertheless, he sinks into clean water once again and finds himself grudgingly grateful. 

“Let me do your hair,” Byleth says, more ask than tell. 

“Why are you doing this?” Dimitri asks. She owes him no such service, and in truth what she does bears no resemblance to a servant’s work. Not with the way she commands him even here. 

“I…” Byleth pauses. “I wanted to. But that’s not enough of an answer, is it?”

He shakes his head.

“When you took my hand tonight,” Byleth says. “That’s the first time anyone’s touched you in five years, isn’t it? For real, not a fight, not…” She trails off.

“It was unnecessary,” Dimitri says. “Even healers can work from a distance.”

“That’s just it,” Byleth says. “Even I get lonely standing apart. At least I think that’s what lonely feels like. It’s.” She closes her eyes. “It’s a little bit like being a ghost. Like I’m still dreaming as my body heals. Like I’m still dead and never woke at all.”

A low, raw noise lodges in Dimitri’s throat. 

“Then someone bumps into me,” Byleth says, “and I know I’m here. I won’t float right through them. I figured it was the same for you. Was I wrong?”

Dimitri laughs, long and bitter. “We’re a fine parade of ghosts, you and I.”

“Two people’s not enough for a parade,” Byleth says, deadpan. 

“And battle won’t do?” Dimitri asks. 

“It’s not the same,” Byleth says. “A spar, that’s closer. But battle isn’t the same. I can’t explain it any better than that. I’m sorry.”

Killing won’t ease anyone’s loneliness, Dimitri thinks. It isn’t meant to. Snuff out enough lives and you may reach your goal. All the parts of you left bleeding on the battlefield serve something like a fair cost. 

He leans back against the rim of the tub. “Do what you will,” he says. 

Her touch is light at first, overly gentle, growing bolder as the knots in his hair come undone and he doesn’t bolt. She works the soap into his roots. Strong fingers massage his temples, his jaw, the base of his skull, dislodging a shameful groan of relief. 

“I’m rinsing now,” she warns him, before pouring warm water over his head. 

She doesn’t ask him to take off his eyepatch, and he holds on so it doesn’t get dislodged. The medics have badgered him about keeping _that_ clean more than often enough. It doesn’t need the extra attention. 

The water streams down his face in rivulets. When he breathes again, it sounds like a sob. 

Byleth’s hand lingers on his cheek, then withdraws. The lack of it is a strange, hollow ache, foolish considering how long he’d done without. 

“You smell much better now,” she tells him. 

“Do I?” Not much of a difference on his end. You get used to the stench of a body if it’s your own. He does feel lighter though he doubts it’s _all_ to do with scraping off a layer of dirt. 

Byleth smiles, faint and real. “Let me know when you—” From the way her muscles tense, Dimitri can tell she’s ready to rise. She will take a step back, and… 

“Let me do something for you as well,” he blurts out. 

“What sort of something?” she asks. 

“Like this.” He stumbles over his lack of words, gestures at the water. Forces himself to keep going. “Like what you did for me.”

“Can I ask why?” She echoes his earlier question back at him. 

“I want to do something kind,” Dimitri says, and surprises himself in saying. “Something which soothes instead of hurting. Something for you.” He backtracks. “Unless it’s something you don’t want, of course, in which case I withdraw my request.” 

She perches on the edge of the tub. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I don’t dislike the thought.” 

Her feet are tiny and already bare as she slings them over the side, toes curling as they touch water. Dimitri sucks in a ragged breath. 

_Now_ , he thinks, and pulls off his gloves. 

The sultry air clings to his fingers, thick as sweat. He clenches his fist. Breathes. Lets it go. 

The soles of Byleth’s feet are calloused, tough like the rest of her. He cups them in his bare hands, lightly tracing the arches. Without the gloves, the deadened sensation in his palms is harder to ignore. Too many hard, shiny scars for touch to cut through, an unwanted armor made of blood and pain. And yet something feels the tiny bones and joints, the knobs at her ankles. He needs to be careful with her. So, so careful. She is strong, but she will hurt or break as easily as any other. 

Once upon a time, Mercedes taught him how to keep from ruining scissors and pins. Even longer ago, his mother’s hands clasping his, teaching him how to shake hands with a maid, how to stroke the muzzle of an elderly hound. Could it be he’s still capable of this?

He runs the washcloth between her toes and she wriggles, letting out a soft, high noise he only belatedly recognizes as a muffed giggle. She’s ticklish. The realization is ill-fitting and sweet in equal measure. 

When Dimitri looks up, her face is relaxed. He folds his hand around one ankle, fighting the sudden urge to kiss the now-clean foot. 

“Thank you,” she says, and leans forward to brush wet hair from his eyes. 

Only hours ago, he saw nothing ahead of him. A road, someone else’s lance piercing his lungs. His own dagger at his throat. It’s been less than a week since he turned into Fleche’s strike and told her to do as she willed. He’d cursed Rodrigue for taking that from him, the girl’s justice and his alike. But the dead can’t be cursed. They can only drive you. 

“How did you know I was leaving?” he asks Byleth. 

She looks away. “I didn’t,” she admits. “I was finishing up in the training hall. I saw you. I’m glad I did.” 

“I…” Dimitri lets go of her to grip the edge of the tub. The wood creaks out its warning. “I’m glad you did too.” 

Byleth folds herself around him, buries her face in the crook of his neck. “Thank you for staying,” she whispers. 

Moments pass. He lifts his hand to her back. Slowly allows himself to take her in his arms. She’s searing-warm against him, something raw and primal released in the intimate touch of skin on skin. 

“There’s one more favor I would ask of you,” he says. “Will you teach me to heal? I’ll never be a mage, but…” His anger had ridden him for so long. He’ll never put aside his lance. It’s too necessary if he means to protect those around him. But a healer’s duty is to protect above all else. Now more than ever, Dimitri desperately needs that reminder. With faith, could he have kept Dedue at his side? Could he have pulled Rodrigue from the brink? No point in thinking about it now. No way to look to the past and know for certain. 

“Anyone can learn,” she says with a nod. 

His arms tighten around her as some vise around his heart cracks and shatters. The lights flicker and the rain keeps drumming on the roof as he holds onto her, his fellow ghost, this strange all-too-living woman, and refuses to let go.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the following FE3H Kink Meme prompt:
> 
> _(Anyone/Dimitri)_
> 
> _Dimitri’s finally back to normal, except there’s still a lot of depression there, he still hasn’t taken an opportunity t shower or wash his clothes or cut his hair. He’s kind of gotten used to it but the body odour stench is still concerning tk everyone. So it’s time to put him in a bath and scrub him down._
> 
> _Maybe he’s reluctant and struggles slightly, maybe he’s placid to it, maybe he’s just embarrassed._
> 
> _Depending o who you pick (or even it’s a group effort), it can be angsty, funny, fluffy, or even subtly d/s where he’s roughly cleaned._
> 
> I continue my trend of using song lyrics to title my fic. This one is from [Up In Our Bedroom After The War](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyP_jjv_udQ), by Stars. Which everyone and their mom has already used up and down for fic titles, but it fit too well to ignore. 
> 
> As always, thanks to [Letterblade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Letterblade) for beta! <3


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